In the field of computer hardware and software technology, the use and deployment of virtual machines has become increasingly common. Virtual machines can generally be considered software implementations of physical computing systems. Data within a specialized data volume is processed by the hypervisors to instantiate a virtual machines. The virtual machines can then run their own operating systems, applications files, and the like. From the perspective of those applications, the virtual machines appear as if they are real machines.
In many implementations, snapshots or derivative versions of the data volume may be accessed and modified. At times, snapshot or derivative version of the data volume may be created due to the access requests or modifications. However, at some point the snapshot needs to be collapsed back into the original data volume. Unfortunately, the input/output operations related to collapsing snapshots can be high cost from a performance perspective, reducing the efficiency and benefits of virtual machine environments.